Minolta MC Tele Rokkor 200mm/3.5

miran · Joined: 01 Aug 2012 Posts: 1364 Location: Slovenia

Since I bought a Minolta SRT-303 camera I've been slowly building a collection of Minolta SR mount lenses which I also use on my NEX-5 with an adapter. The one I use least is the Minolta MC Tele Rokkor 200mm/3.5. It's a beautiful lens and my copy especially is super clean and smooth, basically it's like new.

Would be a joy to use if it wasn't so big and heavy. I find it very hard to get a sharp photo at any aperture, not just wide open. Might be that the lens is simply a little soft, but I think it's just my bad technique. You really need a tripod or at least a monopod for this lens most of the time. And it needs to be strong enough. Mine wasn't and the lens broke it. Surprised

As far as flare goes it's good. It has a built in hood and I had no problems. Colours seem to be neutral, contrast is good. What I don't like about it is the ridiculous MFD - 2.5m! Actually pretty much all Minolta lenses seem to have longer MFD than most other comparable lenses for some reason.

Here's some photos from my first outing with this lens and NEX-5. The first two are at around f/8, the others are wide open. No special postprocessing and mostly no or minimal crop. The long focal length is great to separate the subject from the background.

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And then some more macro shots with a close-up lens and macro ring LED light. I haven't done the math, but that's well beyond 1:1 magnification:

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